PB - read the footnotes after the table presenting the results of the estimate. There are two major differences, both of which have a downward impact on the amount estimated.
One is that a lower cutoff grade was used, but as very few assays were above the cutoffs, either the former or the new more conservative cutoff, the impact of this was minimal.
The other change which I feel explains it all is that the block size was significantly reduced. It is my opinion, and purely gut level opinion, that much of the delay in getting the new NI 43-101 release to us, the owners, was because the company was contesting the change in the modeling from what had been used in earlier estimates. An assay is still extinguished by the reverse cubed distance method, but now the boundary where an assay (without an adjacent assay that can be seen as correspondent) stops contributing any grams to the total estimate is much sooner. IIRC the block size was roughly halved, so the volume influenced by any one assay is reduced (in absence of adjacent correlated assays) to on the order of 1/8th of what it was previously.
Why did mgmt spend so much money, time, and effort on infill drilling just to have those holes not have an impact on the resource ? The PR said that they were too far apart. Well, they were not too far apart for the prior modeling. If that were the case it would be a serious error on the part of mgmt to have spent that money. They are too far apart for the new block size in the model adopted for the latest estimate.
As I see it those estimating the resource held their ground under pressure from the company and refused to change the block size. This would be because they felt that the nature of the assays, of the mineralization (of smaller veinlets mostly) does not justify extrapolation to the distances used in the earlier estimates. IMO they are correct in doing this. With the narrow widths of most assays, and the difficulty in correlating any to other adjacent assays it is hazardous to assume continuity between them. That is how I read it PB.
All JMHO
AI
